It sucks, and I can only imagine they implemented it because they felt they had no other option to deal with the onslaught of bots that's appeared lately.
One thing they could do to improve the situation is to weight vouching heavily by karma. I have plenty of karma but I don't think I've ever successfully pulled a comment out of the [dead] state by vouching for it. Legitimate comments that get flagged by mistake tend to stay that way for the duration of the discussion.